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The right to be forgotten: the legal way to erase your past from Google and the internet
Have you ever searched for your name on Google and found something you’d rather wasn’t there?
An old news story, a problem you resolved long ago, a piece of information that stopped being true but still shows up as if nothing had changed.
This can be uncomfortable for anyone, and even damaging at a business level, since information about you can surface and have a negative impact on your potential clients.
The good news is that a solution exists, and it’s called the “right to be forgotten,” a fully legal route to request that certain information on the internet be removed.
What is the right to be forgotten?
The right to be forgotten is the legal power to ask search engines to remove results containing your personal information when that information is outdated, irrelevant, inaccurate, or causes you harm that’s no longer justified.
In practice, what gets removed is the link in the search engine or platform, not the original page where the information lives.
This is what’s known as deindexing: the news story or post can still exist on its website, but it stops appearing when someone searches for your name.
Where this right comes from
The right to be forgotten was born in Europe in 2014, with a ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union known as the Google Spain case.
In this case, a Spanish citizen asked Google to stop showing an old news story about a debt he had already paid off, and the court ruled in his favor.
Since 2018, this right has been enshrined in the GDPR, the European General Data Protection Regulation, under the name right to erasure, and this is the legal basis that requires Google and other search engines to handle these kinds of requests.
One point worth keeping clear: this right applies mainly in the European Union. Other countries have similar mechanisms, but the strongest and most established protection is the European one.
What information can you remove with the right to be forgotten?
Not all negative information qualifies for removal, but the cases that do tend to succeed are more common than you’d think:
- Old news stories about debts, fines, or penalties you’ve already resolved.
- Court cases that have been dismissed, acquitted, or where the sentence has been served.
- Personal data published without your consent (address, phone number, photos).
- Intimate or sensitive information: health, sexual orientation, beliefs.
- Inaccurate content or content that no longer reflects your current situation.
The criterion that matters in all these cases is the same: when the harm the information causes outweighs the public’s interest in continuing to find it.
What the right to be forgotten doesn’t cover
This right has limits, and knowing them can save you failed requests.
It usually doesn’t apply when the information has real and current public interest: recent serious crimes, corruption cases, or matters that affect third parties.
It also doesn’t protect public figures the same way when it comes to their role. For example, a politician or an executive has less leeway to remove news about their professional activity than a private individual does.
How to exercise the right to be forgotten on Google
The most direct route you can take is Google’s official form for legal content removal requests.
There you can indicate the URLs that affect you, prove your identity, and explain why that information harms you.
The justification is the part that decides the outcome of your request. In other words, it’s not enough to say you don’t like the content: you need to argue why it’s outdated, irrelevant, or disproportionate in relation to your current situation.
What can you do if Google rejects your request?
Getting a negative response from Google is not the end of the road.
The first option you have is to file a complaint with your country’s data protection authority. In the United States, for example, there’s no equivalent authority, since there’s no federal right-to-be-forgotten law.
Even so, you can rely on state privacy laws like California’s CCPA/CPRA, which lets you require companies to delete your personal data, or on a defamation lawsuit when the content is false and damages your reputation.
Your past doesn’t have to define your present on Google
By now you know the essentials of the right to be forgotten: it’s a real legal tool, with clear cases where it works and limits worth knowing before you start.
The key to the whole process lies in the argument.
In other words, a well-supported request, with the right URLs and the proper legal approach, has a much better chance of succeeding than a generic complaint.
It’s also normal for the process to feel like an uphill climb: forms, deadlines, rejections, and legal terms that aren’t always clear.
At Carl Media Removal we work on managing right-to-be-forgotten requests, we remove and deindex negative content, and we take care of the online reputation of individuals and businesses.
If there’s something on Google that keeps telling a story that’s no longer yours, we can review your case and tell you honestly what can be done.
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